I like having a markdown preview available for the following reasons:
* I can quickly tell if I screwed up my whitespace
* I can experiment with features I'm unsure about (images with links)
I like having a markdown preview available for the following reasons:
* I can quickly tell if I screwed up my whitespace
* I can experiment with features I'm unsure about (images with links)
The thing with two spaces at the end of a line indicating line break doesn't make sense to me. It is invisible in most editors, so it is easy to mess up.
That reminds me of a [joke response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8767426) to a vid on the antagonistic programming language, intercal: block comments ought to be text between two lines of 5 spaces each :B
In fairness to markdown, it probably isn't convention to break up a paragraph on different lines with the expectation that it will wrap.
An editor with markdown syntax highlighting or preview helped me learn markdown and still helps me understand the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. It is essential with deeper nesting.
I was surprised by the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. I was surprised that Atom's markdown preview does not yet match the rendering on github.
Or consider some of the bug reports verses pope / vim-markdown:
* #60: inappopropriate italic: foo_<any non-alphanumeric character>bar
* #42: Bold links not being recognized
* #37: Incorrect processing of "_"
* #27: Ending an italic section with an escaped asterisk isn't parsed properly
After first authoring in vim, my preferred markdown editor with preview is http://pad.haroopress.com/ by @rhiokim (open source is promised). Scrolling synced between editor and preview is one of the killer feature.
I think the intent of Markdown is more the plain syntax and non-programmer look of it than the readability.
Headers, tables, headers, blockquotes, code blocks, links, and footnotes can make text hard to read. Especially link syntax can hurt readability, even if you use [url] variables instead of the full (http) url; previews trim that away, although I'm slowly become broken inside enough to find Markdown tables easier to read than HTML renderings.
URLs, footnotes, and the big bad, tables of content, are the kind of set-and-forget stuff you'd probably rather prefer in a separate document or something.
But it's also worth keeping in mind that people use Markdown for very different things, and those who aren't writing extensive READMEs with tables, links, and a bunch of headers won't run into those problems; I love using Markdowns on forums, for instance, but I don't actually read those comments the same way I would an article or a README.
Previews are a little like fuzzy post-deploy tests for typos, poor phrasing, and syntax errors. :)
People who are editing markdown with mathematical formulas in it (via some sort of MathJax extension, like the markdown editor in https://cloud.sagemath.com) really want to be able to see a preview of their formulas, to make sure they are correct.
I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to start encouraging students to write in Markdown instead of Word. It would be a lot easier to do that with an application like this. But I haven't looked into it too closely, so I'm not sure what the best tools are for starting to use Markdown with students.
What? Why? Word and md/html solve quite different problems, the way I see it. Word is very much for paper-oriented documents while md/html are for screen-first.
Word is far from my favorite document preparation system [1] (let's call it that), but it still has many advantages over markdown,
* Html rendering has no concept of pagination. Paginating naively from html (ie printing from a browser) makes ugly documents.
* Word has tools for managing references and bibliography generation
* Also automatic numbering and referencing of tables, figures, etc.
Those are just OTOH features I'd consider important for writing a high school history report or whatever. If this were word '97 we were talking about, I'd understand, but modern Word is a quite powerful tool.
I don't mean to bash or disrepect, just genuinely curious if you'd considered this or you had specific reasons for switching to markdown.
[1] I've really been liking LyX for the past years, but it might be a bit much for your typical high school student. I've been considering trying out an asciidoc -> docbook -> (latex -> pdf or straight docbook to html) workflow. Maybee ascii would interest you, similar plain-text formatting like md but more full featured.
Word works well for students' final work, but it seems to get in the way when students are building their understanding of a topic. I like that Markdown has enough formatting options to organize a document, but not so many options that people get lost in modifying fonts and font sizes, etc.
I'm curious to see if using Markdown while doing exploratory assignments would help students focus more on the information they're learning and documenting, rather than how the final document looks. I'd also like to expose students to a different approach to structuring documents; for many of them, they haven't used anything other than Word.
Printing from the browser has far more to do with the fundamental error of allowing a site's designer to specify formatting than any inherent limitations of HTML. It's possible to create semantic content from a browser page (e.g., with Pandoc or Calibre) and print that. I actually resort far more often than I care to admit to re-tagging content and rendering it either as simplified HTML, Markdown, or LaTeX, for readability's sake.
No disrespect to the OP but the Stackedit editor at https://stackedit.io would be good. No software to install and loads of options for synchronizing and publishing their notes.
I guess the simplest thing would just be to first introduce them to some simple rules, like "this is how you indicate a header", "this is how you indicate emphasis (like italics)".
After all, isn't conventions like that for plain text writing how markdown emerged in the first place?
Teaching the rules is straightforward, I just don't know the available tools very well. I use Markdown on GitHub mostly.
My students will need to print more of their work than I do, they'll want to work on their local filesystem most of the time, and they'll want to work on documents at home as well. I haven't followed the Markdown ecosystem well enough to know which tools to recommend to students and staff, so I appreciate hearing about new tools like the ones mentioned in this thread.
A problem with live preview is that in most iterations, after the first page you cease to see the preview of what you type, and you need to scroll down on the preview to have it match where you are in the source text.
I had developed a few years ago a markdown editor with live preview, with a mechanism that synchronized the source and the preview, scroll-wise, so the preview would always display the part that was being edited.
It didn't take off (at all) so I let it go but I wish there would be a standardized way to do this; I'm surprised this problem isn't otherwise addressed, because it's a real problem for me.
If you're editing sufficiently complex text, instant preview will show where you've fouled up tagging. Missed pairs, headings, whitespace. And tables. Especially tables.
It depends on the complexity of your document. For example, writing a scientific manuscript is a horror in any kind of Markdown.
No proper support or integration for references, equations etc. Everything is hacked together. Even LateX is better at it.
I understand that Markdown is intended for simple documents. But then, I don't see why I should write Markdown instead of just directly typing it out in Libreoffice Writer.
I use my own markdown preview tool to preview what my WP blog post looks like. It's like MS LiveWriter but supports markdown.
I find it easier to write text, insert code and add images in a desktop tool and get live visual feedback, than doing it in the WP editor page, saving and refreshing the post.
I don't find it that odd to want to see a preview, even though I have a pretty good idea of what it will look like. I've been using this editor for a while http://macdown.uranusjr.com